Daily Archives: November 14, 2007

I’ve gone ahead an enabled a comment preview function, which people have been begging and pleading for since the WordPress switchover. You’ll find it below the comment text box when you leave a comment. It seems to work pretty well, but let me know if it presents any issues for you.

I’ve posted over a hundred pictures from my Creation Museum visit, many of which are begging — begging! — to be LOL’d. And I know you folks are the creative types, so I’ve decided to let you all in on the fun with a contest: The LOLCreashun Contest. Here’s how it works:

3. Post the picture in this topic thread at Whateveresque (note: Posting may require some of you to register for Whateveresque if you have not done so already. Don’t worry, it’s free, and I’m the dude who runs it, and I’ll approve registration requests quickly, unless I’m like, you know, asleep. Viewing Whateveresque or this thread does not require registration).

Do me a favor and make the image(s) no wider than 500 pixels.

Post the picture(s) no later than Sunday, November 18, at 11:59:59 Eastern Time.

Enter as many pictures as you like but remember: Quality, not quantity.

4. On Monday, November 19, I’ll announce a winner.

And what will you win? Why, a personalized copy of the signed, limited Subterranean Press edition of The Ghost Brigades, featuring kick-ass full color artwork by Vincent Chong, direct from me, that’s what. It’s a $60 retail value, plus it’ll have my grimy little fingerprints all over it! What a bonus! And the runner-up will get a signed paperback version of The Android’s Dream (third place? You’re fired. And put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers).

I ‘ll be judging on humor, creativity and uniqueness, so don’t all y’all run for the T-Rex photo. Also don’t feel you have to use LOLGrammar, but you definitely won’t be penalized if you do. Finally, if you want to play put can’t avail yourself of a LOLgenerator (here’s one online), just post a picture from the Creation Museum photo set and type in a caption in the Whateveresque thread.

Clearly, for the purposes of this contest, I allow you to take the pictures I’ve taken and modify them however you like. Have fun, you crazy kids.

Any questions? Post them here (but don’t post links to pictures here — go put them in over at Whateveresque).

And while you’re over at Whateveresque, feel free to root around and participate in other threads, or even start a couple and get a new conversation going. It’s the place Whatever readers go when they want to talk without me standing over their shoulder. They’re a fun bunch. Check them out, and join in. That’s an invitation, folks.

Word have I from Subterranean Press that yesterday the rush of pre-orders for Coffee Shop was large enough to make their servers choke (although, to be very clear, every pre-order was successful and got processed — they’re good about that). This makes me happy. Thank you. Also, if you want to be sure you get a copy, I wouldn’t straggle too long. The number of copies available is now significantly down from 500.

I was wondering what would happen to WordPress when I had a day where I pulled in a lot of folks, and yesterday was that day; Whatever pulled in 72K folks, which made it the second busiest day on the site (The Bacon Cat incident still holds top honors, with 76k in one day). And what happened to WordPress, when presented with an outsized bolus of traffic? Nothing at all, which I find encouraging; never once did the site hiccup, all day long. Since one of my main concerns switching over to WordPress was that dynamically generating pages would present a problem, it’s nice to see that I was wrong. I’m sure it helps that I have wp-cache running on the site, so that the database isn’t hit every single time.

That said, a question for you WordPress geeks: Would turning on wp-cache cause underreporting on unique visitors in any way? I have a suspicion, given the size of my raw log file relative to its size on an average day around here, that 72k unique visitors on the day is actually low (my log file was about 10 times normal size, whereas unique visitors was only about twice recent traffic). Any thoughts on this?